A liquid crystal optical apparatus is known that utilizes the birefringence of liquid crystal molecules to change the distribution of the refractive index according to the application of a voltage. There is a stereoscopic image display device that combines such a liquid crystal optical apparatus with an image display unit.
Such a stereoscopic image display device switches between a state in which an image displayed on the image display unit is caused to be incident on the eyes of a human viewer as displayed on the image display unit and a state in which the image displayed on the image display unit is caused to be incident on the eyes of the human viewer as multiple parallax images by changing the distribution of the refractive index of the liquid crystal optical apparatus. Thereby, a two-dimensional image display operation and a three-dimensional image display operation are realized. High display quality is desirable for such display devices.